Ensuring safe and compliant environments is critical in certain industries and contexts. These requirements may be mandated by laws and regulations with an associated jurisdiction, dictated by customer or insurance requirements, or instituted by the stakeholder's of the environment to ensure safety and prevention of harm to themselves and associates.
One such area associated with said liability is fire and fire-related abatement. Various devices, such as extinguishers, fire sprinkler systems, optical fire detectors, and the like may be implemented. Thus, as a fire is detected, a water or fire abatement system may be instigated, and/or a party associated with remediating the fire may be notified.
In the past, optical fire detectors have been proposed. FIG. 1 illustrates an overview of a top-view of an optical fire detector system implementation according to the prior art.
As shown in FIG. 1, an optical fire detector 110 is provided that is capable of capturing a field of view 120 (or “cone of vision”). Inside the cone 120 is a monitored area 130. The monitored area 130 is the area desired to be monitored by an optical fire detector. This area will be the plane for which coverage results will be calculated. This plane may be parallel to the floor of the room.
In this monitored area 130, it is assumed that a fire 140 (shown as a rectangle for illustrative purposes) is able to be detected by the optical fire detector 110, and the monitored area 130 has 100% coverage.
Thus, the goal of any optical fire detection system is to ensure as much coverage as possible. If an area is not viewable by the optical fire detection system, i.e. if a fire originates in this area and is not detected, the fire may cause costly damage, become dangerously large or uncontainable, or be addressed with too long a delay. Thus, ensuring accurate and complete detection is imperative.
An environment or context employing an optical fire detection system, such as the systems shown in FIGS. 2 and 3, may require multiple systems to be implemented in a single space or room. As will be explained below, an environment or context may include objects that obstruct the vision capabilities of the optical fire detector 110. Thus, in order to deal with these obstructions, multiple optical fire detectors, such as those shown in FIG. 1, may be placed in a variety of locations in a specific environment or context.
Various ideas and simulation software may be proposed to detect whether a system's implementation is sufficient. FIGS. 2 and 3 disclose such techniques, with such techniques being somewhat sufficient in estimating/assessing as to whether the implemented systems are sufficient, or alternatively, need augmentation for improvement (i.e., adding more detectors, re-placing existing detectors, and the like).
Thus, the environment shown in FIG. 1 may be modeled employing three-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) techniques. Once the environment is modeled, various placements of optical fire detector 110 may be tested and determined to assess adequacy and coverage. Further, the base may be varied to determine how various planes in space are being efficiently captured.
For example, FIG. 2 illustrates a method of optical fire detection employing a cone of vision overlay with two dimension projections of obstructions. In FIG. 2, the optical fire detector 110 is similar to that shown in FIG. 1, and as such, a detailed description will be omitted.
Referring to FIG. 2, the cone 120 illustrated includes a variety of obstructions, 210 and 220. Also shown are rays 230, which are projected from an optical fire detector 110 (or the location where the optical fire detector 110 is implemented). As shown, some of the rays 230 are able to project to the end or boundary of cone 120 (to monitored area 130), while some of the rays 230 are impeded by either obstruction 210 or 220.
Based on the above, a determination is made that the coverage is of X % (for example, as shown, 44%). An implementer may determine that based on the resultant determination, that the coverage associated with a specific placement of an optical fire detector 110 is not sufficient. As such, additional optical fire detectors may be placed and/or the existing optical fire detectors may be re-situated.
FIG. 3 illustrates another example method for determining coverage of an optical fire detection system (known as the point method). In this method, rays are projected from a finite location 330 (end points) inside the monitored area 130 to the placed location of the optical fire detector 110. The end points (shown in monitored area 130) may be configured and spaced by an implementer of the method. As shown, some of the rays 331 are obstructed, while others are not. Once again, based on this determination, an implementer may employ the method to determine the adequacy of coverage of the test optical fire detector 110. FIG. 3 applies to both the ray tracing method and the point method because they will provide the same results. The difference is that ray tracing goes from the detector out to the edge of the cone-of-vision whereas the point method goes from a finite element on the analysis plane back to the detector.
In any implementation, the implementer achieves an advantage in both costs and efficacy when implementing fewer of the systems described above.